Thank you, Mr. Kelly. I appreciate the question.
I understand the underlying implications of it. I think that probably all the witnesses you've heard from—including me and, though I wouldn't want to speak on his behalf, Mr. Israel—share the same objective. In other words, we want to ensure that Canadian security and intelligence agencies are able to appropriately share information.
The thing that perhaps a member of the Canadian public interested in this question would not fully understand is the issue of why this particular broader definition is needed. As I said in my testimony, I have not heard a good reason for that. What I would encourage the committee to do is to line up the new definition of undermining the security of Canada and its various clauses with the section 2 definition under the CSIS Act, which is of long standing, that defines threats to the security of Canada. It has been operationalized over decades within the security and intelligence communities.
We have arrived—the this term was used recently, in previous testimony—at a kind of cultural understanding of how that works.
There is nothing in the existing section 2 definition of threats to the security of Canada that would be weak or insufficient in terms of allowing, from my perspective, the kind of information sharing that is necessary and appropriate to securing Canadians' safety. The problem, I think, that many of the witnesses you've heard from see with this broader definition is that it is simply too broad and, worse, unnecessary.